The adorable baby Princess Charlotte is just over a week old.
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The adorable baby Princess Charlotte is just over a week old.
Photo / Getty
Finding her way in the world will not be easy. Libby Purves offers her heartfelt advice.
Dear Charlotte,
Welcome to the world of 21st-century women. You broke one old taboo the instant you were born, as the new Succession to the Crown Act made you fourth in line, even if you get younger brothers. It was an important change, in a world where millions of girls are undervalued and denied a voice. As you grow up, the example of your status may, obliquely, be of some help to them.
But despite that status, you're a human being like the rest of us, with your own female life to lead. None of us have all the answers, but there are things an older woman longs to tell any girl. Even more so if she is going to be watched as closely as you are. So here goes.
Being royal is a tricky gig: but your mother has already broken the recent awful pattern of royal brides, and shown great sense. Listen to her, and to Grandma Middleton. That side of the family may be untypically successful in business, but they belong to the heart of middle-class England, which has in recent decades has developed an unshowy, educated, efficient, good-natured brand of feminism. Women like them are not revolutionaries, but they're not passive and obedient, nor merely decorative. They're organisers, rollers-up of sleeves, entrepreneurs, valued employees, tough but kindly bosses, or simply mainstays of WRVS and the Women's Institute social campaigns. They don't put up with any nonsense. You may be a princess, but you have their solid modern realism embedded in your genes, too. That's your luck.
You may get hints on how to survive as a royal female under the pitiless media microscope from your second cousins, Eugenie and Beatrice, and the tough Zara Phillips. They can sympathise with the challenge you will uniquely face, and understand how a young woman might get confused, embarrassed, and bent out of shape emotionally by being stared at, photographed, gossiped about, treated as a fashionplate or a soap opera. Ask how they dealt with it, but take each attitude with a pinch of salt, too. Times and public moods change, and the trail you blaze will be all your own.
You already have the great asset of an older brother, plus one riotous but goodhearted uncle, a soberer one on your mother's side, two grandfathers and two very different royal great-uncles. So you can't grow up without learning about different sorts of men. That's useful. All my life I've been grateful for having three brothers as well as a resident dad: some girls stuck in fatherless, all-female families never quite understand the essential point that men are just another lot of oddball human beings. So they get disastrously tangled up with the wrong ones, because all chaps seem so exotic.
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge leave the Lindo Wing.
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For all the royal privilege and general weirdness, you're just another girl growing up, and you'll have to find out gradually what sort you really are. Look around for role models among happy, busy young women, and try to notice how different they can be. Study cheerful females of all shapes, sizes and tastes: army or protection-officers, boho artists, athletes, designers, lawyers, students, full-time mothers. There are a hundred ways to be a happy woman. The pop and celebrity world will bombard you with images as much as it does any girl, and you will inevitably meet and be dazzled by some "iconic" figures. But don't do what many girls do while they pass through adolescence: don't look for kinship in misery and dysfunction. Addiction, promiscuity, self-harm and irregular, troubled lives do have a strong fascination when you're going through your own inward struggles, but dwelling on them is never helpful.
Acknowledge, pity and help sad people, but don't identify with and hide among them. Don't reinforce the self-doubt and yearning towards victimhood that is one curse of being a female. It did your poor grandmother, Diana, no good. Look outward and upward, at bright things. Be a sunflower, not a shrinking violet or drooping snowdrop.
Defy family tradition and take an interest in the arts, especially the narrative arts of novels and theatre: there is a releasing wisdom to be found in storytelling - and theatre, at least, is having a marvellous creative renaissance. You can start at the age of two with our excellent children's theatres.
Put all your wisdom into knowing your friends, understanding them and trying to see their point of view. Social climbers will throw themselves at you, toxic friends will flatter and then betray you, others will spoil the reality of friendship by giving you too much leeway because you're glamorously royal. There will, sadly, be some close childhood friends in your years of sheltered innocence who later grow away from you, simply because your life is so different. Cling on whenever you can. Know that real friendships are as vital as food and shelter: you will never lack for material comfort, but friends are a prize that you alone can win, nurture and hang on to. Don't let your status tempt you to summon them peremptorily and drop them as if they were mere courtiers. Go out of your way to fit in with their lives and listen to their concerns, just as a normal person would. Because on this level, you are no more or less than a normal person.
And let some of those friends be male! Your generation will be even more at ease platonically among men than your mother's was, and far more relaxed than your grandmother's. Enjoy that. Learn to take male joshing, disgraceful black humour, and mocking laddish banter. It's good for girls to have brotherly confidants and companions, and not get sucked into a giggling, perfumed, over-?feminised world. And you'll know when to shoot them down when they go too far. With a bit of luck, you'll have inherited that piercing royal death-stare from your great-aunt Anne and great-grandad Philip. A good, stiff glare works even for us commoners when we need to assert ourselves, and will be very handy for you. Remember that privacy is a jewel, and don't spend it recklessly.
Another thing: no girl or young woman, least of all one in the public eye, should listen to anyone who says that something is "unfeminine". It is obviously bad to be inappropriately raucous, or graceless, or rude, and of course you can enjoy the girly pleasures if that's your taste - dressing-up, scented candles, fluffy toys, pink stuff, whatever. But being "feminine" or even "ladylike" should never be a constricting trap: a sort of sidesaddle, knees-together, overly modest, blushing, giggling diffidence.
If you want to wear trousers, do so. If you decide that touch-rugby or shot-putting is your favourite sport, or you want to be Ubu or Falstaff in the school play, go for it. Defy your parents if you need to. I doubt that you will be too shocking, because your mother and Aunt Pippa walk the line beautifully, tearing round hockey pitches with no fear of mud and sweat while still scrubbing-up very smartly indeed. But there will be some people, and some commentators, who want you to be a Princess Barbie. Unless you really want to be, you don't have to be.
Nor, even if your favourite song turns out to be I enjoy being a girl, do you really need to pay much attention to the vagaries of fashion. Leave that to actors, politicians' wives and It Girls. Wear whatever feels nice, pleases you in the mirror, and attracts as much - or as little - attention to your body as you like. If there's a trend for very tight clothes or for exposing more leg, bosom or midriff than you are comfortable with, ignore it. If you want to wear flat shoes, just do.
So good luck. It's an ever-better country in which to be a woman, though there are still injustices and inequalities. The scrutiny you will live under is a burden but also a privilege, because you will be able to do what, in this odd constitutional monarchy, the best of your family have always done: which is to reach out and reassure, smile and listen, and symbolise the ease and unity and confidence that a national community craves.
Don't become a creature of PR advisers and self-important courtiers: be whoever you are. From time to time you will make mistakes, or just suffer some innocently awkward gaffe. Any of us can do this, but yours will be magnified a thousand times by the media on a day when there isn't much else to talk about. You'll feel terrible, especially when you're young, and you'll cringe and want to hide. But you can't. So apologise if you need to, keep smiling, stride on, be philosophical, and remember that these things pass.
Playful and popular Prince Harry, the uncle to Charlotte, charms Kiwi crowds.
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If you do do anything really disastrously newsworthy, hole up for an hour or two with your Uncle Harry. He's done worse, and generally emerges rather more popular than before.
